December 23, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

EDWARDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS

We members of the working class have been hammered by Republican administrations and by Democrats who have been complicit in voting for Republican policies. We've heard about the advantages of "free trade," but agreements like NAFTA and GATT have exported good jobs from this country and left disaster in their wake. We've seen politicians make tax cut after tax cut for the very rich and for corporations, but basic infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Millions of us don't have health insurance. Millions of Americans live in desperate poverty. FDR was called a "traitor to his class" and John Edwards has been attacked by right-wingers for being rich, but talking about helping the poor, the working class, and the middle class. I support John Edwards for president. This article is by Stephen Crockett from www.democratictalkradio.com:

The wages of Americans have been suppressed. The ability to unionize in order to achieve higher standards of living has been attacked by federal legislation, right wing court rulings and harassment by oppressive federal government regulation by the Bush Administration. Edwards is the most labor-friendly Presidential candidate of the top-tier candidates. With Edwards, we have a candidate who both walks the walk and talks the talk. Edwards is strongly opposed to outsourcing American jobs and is committed to ending unfair international trade deals or tax policies that encourage corporations to move jobs out of the nation.


Poverty in America has largely been ignored by our political leadership since the 1980’s. We waste trillions of dollars fighting unnecessary wars but seem unwilling to seriously commit to eliminating institutionalize poverty. Edwards is the only candidate really talking about poverty in America. Poverty is a serious issue in many rural American communities and inner cities. Most candidates ignore the poor because they do not write big campaign donation checks. Edwards can give the poor hope and get them voting.

We remain the only nation out of the 75 most economically advanced nations not to have government guaranteed universal health insurance. We cripple our corporations in international competition by forcing them to provide for healthcare. As a nation we spend 17% of our economy on healthcare while our competitors spend 8%. Our competitors cover all citizens while we have 47 million uninsured citizens and even more underinsured. If we had not abandoned our FDR political traditions, this situation would have been corrected long ago. Edwards is committed to universal healthcare.

AMERICAN DREAM IS DISAPPEARING

We get told in the United States that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be a success. Now if you work hard and play by the rules you lose ground. The productivity of workers in the United States is the highest in the world. But the gains from our productivity are going to fat cats and not being shared with us. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.truthout.org:

Record bonuses on Wall Street at a time when ordinary working Americans are filled with anxiety about their economic future are signs that the trickle-down phenomenon that was supposed to have benefited everyone never happened.
The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

A study released last month by the Pew Charitable Trusts noted that "for most Americans, seeing that one's children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American dream." But for the past 40 years, men in their 30s, prime family-raising age, have found it difficult to outdistance their dads economically.

As the Pew study put it: "Earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades." Family incomes have improved during that time largely because of the wholesale entrance of women into the work force.

For the very wealthy, of course, it's been a different story. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005.

What seems to be happening now is that working Americans, and that includes the middle class, have exhausted much of their capacity to tread water. Wives and mothers are already working. Mortgages have been refinanced and tremendous amounts of home equity drained. And families have taken on debt loads - for cars, for college tuition, for medical treatment - that would buckle the knees of the strongest pack animals.